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If your question is specifically referring to the leetcode style coding interviews, this is exactly how Silicon Valley engineering careers work if you want to c
by posharma 5y ago
If your question is specifically referring to the leetcode style coding interviews, this is exactly how Silicon Valley engineering careers work if you want to change jobs.
- ilrwbwrkhv 5y agoWhich is such a strange optimization. As an industry we should boycott leetcode style questions.
- qweqwweqwe-90i 5y agoI wouldn't want to work with someone that doesn't have their fundamentals down. Most people spend at least 4 years studying CS, they should know their stuff.
- slumpt_ 5y agoFortunately for all the productive engineers out there, solving leetcode reflects absolutely nothing about how much they know their fundamentals or “stuff.”
- qweqwweqwe-90i 5y agoYou'd be surprised.
- slumpt_ 5y agoFifteen years of industry experience and a top uni Master’s and I can assure you leetcode doesn’t predict anything reliably. It predicts how much time they spent solving leetcode, and biases towards recent graduates. If you’re hiring senior talent it’s mostly a wash and a waste of time. But it’s deep in valley culture so we’ll likely waste our time with it for another decade or so before we wise up.
- bussierem 5y agoI studied CS for 4 years and have used exactly none of it since leaving college. Our devs all help with hiring and agree as a 20-person team that academic "experience" means almost nothing unless you have no other job experience. How little academia prepares you for anything in real software engineering has become a cultural meme.
- freedomben 5y agoDid your CS degree cover algorithms and data structures? Did you learn Big O?
- bussierem 5y agoAlgorithms? yes, basic algorithms and sorting and Big O, none of which I've needed in 10 years of professional and hobby dev work. But to say "well you learned data structures and you use hashmaps and arrays so obviously it helped" is a very strange defense of academia. I can also learn "datastructures" online in a few days of studying as a new dev, so that's not really a good defense of 4 years of study.
- tharkun__ 5y agoDisclaimer: Not who you are replying to. For myself at least: absolutely yes. That's actually some of the first stuff they taught us. Would I want to be interviewed on whether I can implement a linked list from the top of my head in an arbitrary language and 100% correctly in a high stress interview situation? Absolutely not. (and a linked list in the end is something really really easy if you ask me) Does that in any way relate to what I'm doing right now? A little! This will differ depending on who exactly you work for and in what role. It certainly helps to have learned this stuff. I can honestly say that it was fun seeing how regular expressions actually work, how you implement a parser for it etc. But then you learn as well (right there in university) that you better use a parser generator after just having defined the grammar instead of writing it yourself. How many jobs are out there that require you to write a grammar for something? To create a new language? Very very few. There's a market for "boring business software X" software developers. Is it the most important thing I consider when hiring? Absolutely not. We also don't pay FAANG salaries where I work. Do I want capable software developers? Smart guys for sure. People that are curious, willing and able to learn, writing maintainable code. Guys that if I tell them that there's a hidden n^3 algorithm in what they just wrote and it _does_ matter for the (relatively small but large enough) volumes of data this will run on can look up/ask for what that means. EDIT: interesting down votes. I hope someone will reply to explain. I certainly don't see why we can't have a civil discussion especially given that we seem to agree on it having been good to get a solid university education. FWIW I have a Master's in Computer Science. From a country that values non university education (Germany - where you can do vocational training to become a programmer. Just like you can become a master carpenter through that system).
- taurath 5y agoYou'd probably be surprised how many people you've worked with who are quite competent if not really great at what they do and have gaping holes in what you might consider fundamentals.
- dagw 5y agoMost people spend at least 4 years studying CS Many of the best programmers I've worked with haven't.
- bovermyer 5y agoI've spent over a decade in the field. I had two formal years of CS in university. The rest of my tertiary education was art and history. Would I be a good CS researcher? No, not even close. Am I a good software engineer? Damn straight I am. Would I work with you? Sounds like we wouldn't be a good "culture fit."
- pc86 5y agoYou're welcome to, but don't expect to get jobs at any company folks have heard of. I don't like it, but it's just the way it is now.
- the_only_law 5y agoForget names, don’t expect to get paid any number that look remotely appealing.
- bovermyer 5y agoI've worked for some very big name companies that millions have heard of. I have only had to do a coding challenge once, and that was not for any of the big fish. I imagine we operate in very different geographic regions of the USA.
- bradlys 5y agoBut do they pay $400K+/yr? That’s the point.
- noleetcode 5y agoI do. I used to reject recruiter's advances the moment they described the interview process as a leetcode-hazing ritual (my words, not theirs), but as I've become even more grumpy/depressed over the poor state of things I might take it step further and start wasting their time (interviewing and then running the interviewers in circles for a while).